


Love Letter from A Hundred Lightyears away

by Kris_House



Category: Original Work
Genre: Grief/Mourning, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-30
Updated: 2020-09-30
Packaged: 2021-03-07 15:50:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,179
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26730157
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kris_House/pseuds/Kris_House
Summary: What did humans need in order to survive? We’d debated the question all night sitting on our bed shoulder-to-shoulder. Would there still be a need for personal transportation? Should the power grid be centralized or distributed? How should the value of work be evaluated? Should the colony be community-based?“Utopia is by definition impossible to achieve,” I said to him. He complained about my perpetual pessimism with a scowl and turned away from me, jotting down his wishes in his notebook. That night, as we quietly lay on our bed, he whispered into my ear like he was telling me a secret, “If you’re in the future I picture, I want to give you a better world.”A story about loss and companionship.
Kudos: 2





	Love Letter from A Hundred Lightyears away

**Author's Note:**

  * A translation of [一百光年以外的告白](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26528188) by [Kris_House](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kris_House/pseuds/Kris_House). 



Breathe.

I could hear my joints crack as I sat up. Almost involuntarily, my mouth fell open and air rushed into my lungs. It tasted foreign, strange. My body struggled to warm up from its long hibernation. _Breathe_ , a voice said. _Take it easy and breathe._

A personable face greeted me when my vision cleared. She looked to be in her thirties, dressed in a long white coat. “How are you feeling?” she asked in a slightly accented Mandarin, writing something in the air with her index finger. “Water?”

With a tap of her fingertip, a robotic arm handed me a glass of water. It caught me off guard, and I thanked the robotic arm without thinking. That got a peel of laughter out of the woman.

“You’ve been recovering well,” she said. “You’ll still need to do some PT in the short term, but you should be able to stretch your legs in a few days. I’ll find you a caretaker. Do you prefer human or AI? A human caretaker costs more, but as our honored guest, I’m pretty sure you won’t have to pay a dime for your entire life. Budget allocated to your pensions alone will last you til you’re a hundred.”

I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply, feeling in over my head. Where is this place? How did I get here? Where’s Junting?

“Apologies, I’m getting ahead of myself,” the woman said. “What’s the last thing you remember, sir?”

I rubbed my forehead. “You don’t have to be so formal with me. I remember...”

 _...Doctors in white coats surrounded me to form a white wall. Behind them, Shen Junting’s pale face was covered in tears. I couldn’t say anything with the breathing tube going deep into my trachea._ Don’t cry _, I could only mouth at him._

For a moment, I wondered if I was dead, but I didn’t think budgets and pensions existed in either heaven or hell.

“I was in the ICU, in the middle of a resurrection attempt,” I said. “Did Junting transfer me to a different hospital?”

The woman gave me a pitying look. My heart pounded painfully as realization snuck up on me, unbidden.

“This is TOI 700 d, New Earth,” she said. “New calendar year 17, 2189 in the old world.”

***

It took them—us a hundred years to reach this planet.

It used to take three days for humans to travel 1.3 lightseconds to reach the Moon, and twenty to thirty thousand years to travel a lightyear. With technology advancements came the possibility of traveling at the speed of light, but it still took a hundred years to reach TOI 700 d, which was a hundred lightyears away from Earth. During the trip, the first generation of _Ark One’s_ crew had all passed away. It’d been the children they’d given birth to on the ship who took over and completed the mission.

“...TOI 700 d is tidally-locked to the star. One half of the planet is thus always daytime, while the other half is always in the dark. So far, the human colonies are concentrated on the star-facing side. The Alliance of Governments plan to develop the fringes of the dark side of the planet in fifty years...”

This was a world I didn’t know.

The city itself resembled a giant greenhouse. There were potted plants and small gardens everywhere, as if all the inhabitants partimed as gardeners for the sake of the colony. High above was a dome of fake blue sky and an artificial sun, simulating the day-night cycle humans were familiar with. Running through the gridded streets weren’t cars, but trams for public use. Everything is in perfect order, but not in a way that makes it oppressive.

I was reminded of what I’d seen in Junting’s notebook. Precise ink lines brought to life the future in his imagination. What did humans need in order to survive? We’d debated the question all night sitting on our bed shoulder-to-shoulder. Would there still be a need for personal transportation? Should the power grid be centralized or distributed? How should the value of work be evaluated? Should the colony be community-based?

“Utopia is by definition impossible to achieve,” I said to him. He complained about my perpetual pessimism with a scowl and turned away from me, jotting down his wishes in his notebook. That night, as we quietly lay on our bed, he whispered into my ear like he was telling me a secret, “If you’re in the future I picture, I want to give you a better world.”

Between us, he was always the romantic one.

“Sir, are you alright?” a young voice said with a toothless lisp. I could tell the girl had begun to lose her baby teeth before I even looked at her.

She was no taller than my waist and holding a pot of bright orange marigold in her arms, which cast warm colors in her grey-blue eyes. “Why are you crying? Are you in pain? My mom’s a doctor. She can help.”

“I’m fine,” I said with a smile. “Where’s your mom? She must be worried sick after you ran off.”

The girl pouted. “I didn’t run off. I’m here on an errand for grandpa.”

She held the pot up like she was offering me a treasure. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

“Yeah.” I put a steadying hand on the marigold. “Where are you going? I’ll walk with you.”

It didn’t take more than a few steps for a familiar figure in white coat to jog up to us, calling out, “Clare!” She knelt down and reprimanded the girl, telling her to stay in the lobby the next time. Then she complained in a low voice, “What’s dad thinking? He shouldn’t be sending you on errands at your age. What if you get lost?”

She was surprised when she looked up and saw who I was. “Mr. Lin?”

“Dr. Slater.” I nodded in greeting. “I was doing PT. Here to get some fresh air.”

“How did it go?”

“Well. A weekly schedule will work from now on.”

She nodded. “You should be able to go home soon. Has someone shown you your place?”

“Yeah.”

I looked at the gated community surrounded by brick walls in the distance. Plum trees seemed to have grown out of asphalt, but now I knew they were artificial trees designed for photosynthesis. They wouldn’t grow or die, and the pink flowers adorning the branches would never wilt. They looked just like the plum tree rustling softly nearby when he confessed to me.

“That’s Dr. Shen’s design,” Slater said. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

 _Impractical_ , I thought with a smile.

“Yes, yes it is.”

***

Light had to enter the human eyes before an image could be perceived. In some way, we were always looking into the past. At a close distance the difference in time was too minor for us to notice, but in the almost infinite cosmos, long distance allowed our gaze to travel through time. We were always looking at something from hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands years ago.

From TOI 700 d, we saw Earth as how it was a hundred years ago. Many locals had gotten into the habits of stargazing. What they were looking at weren’t stars, but the past of our homeland.

The day I moved into my new home, I received a one-direction transmission from Shen Junting. It traveled from Earth to TOI 700 d over the past hundred years, and was sent from the satellite above the dome to the receiver set up by my living room wall. My vision blurred when his face appeared on the screen, both familiar and utterly foreign in its maturity. I quickly wiped my tears away to clear my view.

He waved his hand at the camera and gave me his usual warm smile. There were creases at the corners of his eyes that hadn’t been there before we parted.

“A-Yuan,” he said. “It’s been a while.”

“I hope you’ll get this message alright.” He paused and lowered his voice. “You should if they’ve done as I said. They weren’t just humoring me, were they? I’m kinda a big deal.”

“It’s been nearly twenty years. I wonder if you can still recognize me. Ah, you’re much younger than I am now. You aren’t going to run away screaming, are you?”

“I won’t,” I said even though I knew he couldn’t hear me. “You look as good as you did seventeen years ago.”

He paused like he’d heard me, smiling so deeply that his eyes narrowed into two crescent moons. “I knew you’d still find me hot. I think so too.”

“How’s the new earth? Did they follow my blueprints? If they did, the roads must have been your favorites. It’s like a chess board, straight lines, straight angles.”

A teasing smile played at his lips.

“Only you would call someone _symmetrical_ and mean it as a compliment. I thought that was an insult at first. I would’ve been scared away if I hadn’t set up my mind to woo you.”

“Have you had dinner? You really shouldn’t skip meals just because you rarely feel hungry. I’m worried that you’ll faint from low blood sugar one day without anyone noticing.”

“Hm, I feel like getting fried rice. I wonder if the Chinese take-out at the corner is open today.”

He talked about the weather, about work, about obnoxious colleagues. As if there was only a dining table separating us, rather than a hundred lightyears.

I couldn’t hold him when he complained about the freezing weather, couldn’t let him bounce ideas off me when he got stumped in his research, couldn’t offer comfort when he was feeling down because of his supervisor. It was all I could do to talk back at the image on the screen in a voice only I could hear.

“I should get back to work.” He pursed his lips and reached out to stop the transmission, but put his hand down before he could do that and gave me a small smile. “No one has yelled at me for taking up all the bandwidth yet. Why don’t I keep transmitting?”

He lowered his eyes. “Let me be selfish for a little longer.”

The transmission came from a distant past, but it could also be construed as the present. If there was something that would allow me to not only see earth, but into the lab and see him, I’d see Shen Junting typing away on his keyboard with tears in his eyes, like he was doing on screen. That made me feel a little better, even though I was only fooling myself.

“Dr. Shen!” someone said from outside the window in an exasperated tone that suggested this was far from the first time. Shen Junting smiled apologetically at her and walked toward the camera.

“I should go, or Sherry may have a stroke. Let’s do this next time.” He met my gaze through the screen. “Good night, Mingyuan. I love you.”

He blew a kiss at the camera. The image paused at the moment he started laughing, his reddened eyes shiny with tears.

I covered my mouth and buried my face into my knees.

***

“You’ve been here all afternoon. Aren’t you getting tired of the view?”

There was an observatory in the suburbs of the city. Anyone was allowed to make an appointment and use the telescope here, which was pointed at the old Earth by default. Sometimes, schools would take young students who had never seen the old Earth here to explain the history not too far into the past. Some of their parents had been old-Earthers, skipping generations to come to the new planet through cryo technology; others had been born on the ark, and had never set foot on the homeland of human beings, either.

The girl who approached me looked about sixteen or seventeen. She wore the uniform of the staff and a curious expression.

“Were you born here?”

“Yeah.” She sat down and crossed her legs. “I was born the first day of the first month of the first year here. Isn’t that awesome?”

I smiled a little. “It is.”

“You haven’t answered my question,” she said. “I’ve seen you here many times. You always stay for hours and hours. I’m terrible with faces, but even I recognize you. The old Earth isn’t going to change no matter how long you stare at it. How are you able to look at it for so long?”

“There must be others like me,” I said. “There’s nothing special about me.”

“But you’re the only one who’s so persistent. Besides, if there’s nothing special about you, why does my boss treat you like you’re royalty everytime you visit?”

She imitated her supervisor as she spoke with a dramatic flair that made me laugh. I moved to the side and pointed at the telescope.

She cocked her head and took my place.

“Have you learned about the geography of the old Earth?”

She nodded.

“It’s daytime in the west hemisphere. I was looking at Houston, Texas, a city in the United States in North America.”

“Oh.” She looked over her shoulder at me. “Houston as in _Space Center Houston_?”

“Yes, that’s where my husband works,” I said softly. “He should be arguing with someone in some meeting room ‘now’.”

Realization dawned on her. For a moment, nothing came out of her agape mouth. In the end, she managed to say, “Sorry.”

I shook my head. “There’s nothing to apologize for.”

Probably worried that she would upset me, she changed the subject and asked me about the old Earth. As someone who was born in this colony, her understanding of the day-night cycle and seasons was very different from that of the old-Earthers. Outside the dome, it was always daytime. Within the dome, the weather was always pleasant, and there were no seasons.

“I’ve only been outside once my whole life,” she said. “I was born here, but I can only survive in the planet’s atmosphere with an oxygen mask. Everything was flat as far as the eyes could see. Strong winds blow in the same direction. The teacher said the winds had come from the other side of the planet and converged at the star-facing side. I’ve seen clouds before, but I’ve never seen rain, or snow.”

She turned to me. “Have you seen snow?”

“I have.”

When I was still relatively healthy, Houston had seen an unprecedented cold winter. Snow piled up to half a man’s height. It was unsettling to think about what could’ve caused the unusual weather, but Shen Junting and I couldn’t help getting excited over the rare snowfall. We went to the backyard and played like children.

Making a decent snowball seemed impossible without experience. We had to turn to our neighbor’s kids for guidance and finally managed to make a pair of snowmen. One wore my scarf, and the other wore his hat. He used sticks to create a deadpanned face on my snowman, and I arranged stones into a smile on his.

“What does it feel like to touch snow?”

I thought for a second. “Ever touched frost in the freezer? It’s pretty similar. After some time, though, the snow will solidify under its weight and become more like ice.”

She nodded bemusedly. “It’s good to have changing weather. It’s a hassle to use an umbrella, and high temperature makes it a pain to go out, but it’s better than feeling like every day is the same.”

I laughed. “That’s what he said.”

“Your husband?”

“Yeah. He wanted to add changing seasons and weather to the design of the dome, but his supervisor and colleagues disagree. They thought he was making their lives harder for no good reason, making it more difficult and costly to maintain all the facilities.”

The girl paused. “Wait, _he_ designed the dome?”

I smiled. I’d never thought I would one day witness him become the great scientist he’d dreamed about becoming when he was little. If he could see the portrait of him in the observatory, he would try to talk the management into covering his picture with a flushed face.

“He’s Shen Junting, the one featured in your exhibition downstairs.”

The girl made a surprised noise and lowered her voice, “No wonder my boss treats you like that.”

I laughed.

Feeling my watch vibrate, I propped myself up and helped the girl to her feet. “I should go,” I said. “Maybe you’ll be here the next time I visit.”

“Got a date?”

I nodded. “An important phone call.”

She looked confused, but she didn’t ask. As I turned to leave, she called out after me, “Wait, I’m Ellie. What’s your name?”

“Lin Mingyuan,” I said. “You can call me Lin.”

***

“A-Yuan! Guess what my boss told me today? ‘I’m glad we have you,’ he said. Holy mother of god, I thought he’d been kidnapped by aliens. It’s so unlike him to be that sentimental.”

“Yuan Yuan Yuan Yuan, I’m so tired today. I hate social calls like this. Tsk, they aren’t gonna cut our funding even if I don’t play by their rules, are they?”

“I think I’ve caught a cold, but it’s okay; I can still take care of myself. I’ll have my assistant get dinner for me. You should eat, too.”

“Our wedding anniversary is coming up. My boss, uncharacteristically generous of him, gave me a short vacation. I didn’t really want to go anywhere. I just want to talk to you. So here I am, in the lab. I’m all yours today.”

“I miss you, Mingyuan, but I don’t regret what I did… Earth will soon become uninhabitable. You have no future here.”

“Even if I’m not with you in your future, I want you to be happy.”

Shen Junting’s transmission came every Friday. He always went into details about everything that had happened in the past week. If not for the fact that he couldn’t hear me, I could’ve pretended that we were only separated because of work, and would soon see each other again.

I wasn’t sure if this was comfort or torture. It felt like having a dull knife going back and forth on my heart. It never drew blood, and the pain was dull. Every week I waited for Friday to come. The rest of the week things just blurred together. I almost couldn’t tell when a day ended and the next day began.

Dr. Slater was friendly, and Ellie always started a conversation with me when I visited the observatory. The other residents of the gated community often invited me to their gatherings, too. Still, I felt out of place. It wasn’t just because my roots were back on the old Earth, but also because my mind was elsewhere. It wasn’t difficult to change things. I simply had to turn the receiver off. However, just as he wouldn’t miss the chance to talk to me even when he was sick, I couldn’t sever the only connection between us.

“I’m sorry, Mingyuan.”

“I thought it’d be enough for me to keep you company from a hundred lightyears away, but it isn’t as easy as I thought.”

“I couldn’t let go, Mingyuan. Would you hate me for that?”

“I wouldn’t,” I whispered at him. “Thank you.”

***

I knew the day would come.

The moment I woke up on this planet, he’d already left the world. What had been keeping me company was nothing but the lingering image of the past, bound to disappear one day.

His death was a sudden one. It had been his assistant who gave me the news. “Dr. Shen wanted to be buried in his backyard,” she said, her expression calm, but her shaky voice betrayed her emotions. “Rest assured that I’ll follow his will. He—”

Her pitch raised from suppressing the urge to cry, and her eyes brimmed with tears. “He wanted to send a plum tree to TOI 700 d with you, but space on the ark is limited, and there were more necessary crops to be stored. He had no choice but to send some seeds instead. I’m not sure if the researchers on your end have planted them as he instructed.”

“You know him. He can be so stubborn sometimes.” She lowered her head and let out a choked laugh. “I hope that one day, plum blossoms will bloom all over the colony. That’ll make him happy.”

She bowed at the camera. “I hope all is well for you. There wasn’t a day he didn’t think of you.”

I didn’t know how to mourn him. For others, Shen Junting had died more than a hundred years ago. He couldn’t even be considered a contemporary. His name was followed by dates of birth and death in the observatory’s exhibition. The textbooks always talked about him in the past tense. I was the only one who stubbornly saw him as my present and fooled myself into believing the weekly transmission were our dates.

In some way, I was glad that he’d kept me company for the past few years in this way. At least I had something to look forward to in my life. At the same time I blamed him. Why would he send me into a future without him? Why did he allow me to see him after abandoning me?

“Lin?”

“Hi.” I raised a bottle of beer at Ellie. “Want a drink?”

Ellie gave me a weird look. “I’m not twenty-one yet.”

“Ah, that’s right. The old American law. It’s fine if there’s someone over twenty-one with you.”

“For real?”

“For real.”

She took my offer and had a sip. Immediately, she grimaced, her nose wrinkling. “That’s gross.”

The warm buzz of the alcohol made it easier to laugh. I drank as I looked at Earth through the telescope. “A hundred years ago, he passed away.”

“... _Oh_.”

“I’ve said my goodbye,” I murmured. “He could’ve bade the uninhabitable world farewell after I died and started a new life on this planet, but he made the decision for me and had me take his place.”

“I should hate him, but I could never stay angry at him for too long.”

“If I were in his shoes, maybe I would do the same thing.”

“I couldn’t not do anything when he had a chance to live, could I?”

I didn’t know what I wanted her to say. Whatever she said would be fine, perhaps, or she didn’t even have to say anything. I just wanted someone to hear me, instead of speaking into the vacuum like I’d been doing.

“He loved you very much,” Ellie said. “And you, him.”

I threw her a glance. “Yeah.”

“I can’t imagine doing the same.” She shook her head. “If the world is ending, I probably won’t give up on my chance to live just to save my sick boyfriend. Even if I love him a lot, I’ll rather die with him.”

I snorted. “Youth these days are so dramatic.”

Ellie rolled her eyes. “ _Youth_? How old do you think you are?”

“Almost a hundred and sixty. That old enough for you?”

“Your time in cryo doesn’t count.”

Maybe it’d be easier if we could think like she did. I’d die on Earth with him, and we’d be buried at home together. The future would belong to the new generation. But neither of us were Ellie. In the end, he exchanged his life for a lifetime of loneliness for me.

How foolish.

“Don’t drink too much, or I wouldn’t know how to take you home.”

“Just let me stay here if I get too drunk,” I slurred. “Don’t worry, your boss won’t blame you.”

“What if you break something while you’re drunk? Are you gonna pay for that? Hey, why are you still drinking? Are you listening to me?!”

I burst into laughter with a bottle of beer in my arms.

***

A week later, the local research institute contacted me. With great excitement, they told me the plum tree in their cultivation chamber had bloomed and asked if I wanted the tree transported to my place in accordance with Shen Junting’s will. The tree was bigger than I expected. They set up a glass greenhouse with adjustable temperature in my backyard. Then they moved the tree in. The clusters of pink flowers looked like gentle flames.

“A-Yuan,” he’d once stammered under a tree like this, “I love you. Will you take me as your boyfriend?”

Years later, he’d gotten down on one knee under the same tree and said in a trembling voice, “I promise I’ll make you happy.”

I didn’t believe in ghosts, nor did I believe in an afterlife, but at this moment, I’d like to believe that his lingering will had travelled a hundred lightyears to make the flowers bloom for me.

Leaning against the cool glass, I could almost see him standing under the tree, his cheeks a shade of red more vibrant than even the flowers.

“I love you,” I said. “I love you, too.”


End file.
